Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

#191

Post by dist-epoch » Thu, May 08, 2025, 5:57 PM UTC

biofox wrote: post #159

jorvi wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am still hoping that one day we get an open source image editing application to the level of Photoshop (and for Darktable to become as good as Aperture / Lightroom). One of the things that Blender did right is adhering to industry standards, especially keybinds. When Blender did their huge UI rework they decided to normalize to the keybinds of its closed-source competitors, along with some of the workflows. Meanwhi…

What the heck happened to Photoshop and Illustrator (and the whole Adobe suite)? They monochromed all of their icons and removed most of their text and tooltips. As a casual user, I used to be able to use their tools fairly proficiently, but now I find them virtually unusable.

> They monochromed all of their icons

One reason I heard is that color needed to be removed to not alter your color perception when editing a photo.

Re: Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

#192

Post by postalcoder » Thu, May 08, 2025, 5:58 PM UTC

tbeseda wrote: post #188

postalcoder wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't set up my about page yet but I was going to attribute much my design to their page. I've taken a ton of inspiration from hckernews.com because it's the front page I always frequented prior to making this. My primary issue with it was that I wanted more sorting capabilities (aggregate mode), and wanted to be able to see the highest engagement threads (by comments).

Very cool. I have something similar that's more of a running timeline than a view of the front page. I need to work on the controls so you can better specify thresholds. https://hnr.app (hckrnews.com credit in footer because I also found it helpful)

this quite nice as it reminds me of a good ol rss reader.

regarding controls, one of the dumb reasons i wanted to remake hckernews is i don’t like the two taps to change the view.. im happy with the brutalist settings panel up top.

Re: Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

#193

Post by achr2 » Thu, May 08, 2025, 6:02 PM UTC

gr33nq wrote: post #69

achr2 wrote: post #66

This is my own software, but – as a project engineering data exploration tool – high information and functional density was a key goal: https://engdata.com/

What UI framework did you use to build this? I love these types of interfaces in native applications.

This was build originally with WPF and C#, but with an in-house MVVM framework. I have been slowly moving it to Avalonia, which I highly recommend.

Re: Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

#194

Post by divbzero » Thu, May 08, 2025, 6:03 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #149

postalcoder wrote: post #145

I'm working on a Hacker News front page with the idea of UI density as a foundational concept. https://hcker.news I haven't did a Show HN yet but I'd love to get some feedback on it first. It's got a lot of configurable views and can be made extremely dense (dense mode on + columns: auto). The aesthetic itself was made to deviate as little from the HN frontpage as possible. It's got a lot of filtering knick knacks li…

How do you decide which stories to include in the list for a given day, and how to rank them?

Thanks for keeping the HN API open for these alternative UIs.

Re: Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

#195

Post by smusamashah » Thu, May 08, 2025, 6:04 PM UTC

mg wrote: post #9

I am developing this project, which replaces product lists with what I call "product charts": https://www.productchart.com The idea is to sort products not by one parameter (like price or release date) but by two - which creates an x/y chart. The product info is displayed dynamically - by default only the image is show. On hover, more info is displayed in a tooltip. And when you click "details", all data is shown. Th…

You made some other projects too to search movies for example right? I can't remember the name at the moment.

edit: found them.

https://www.gnovies.com/ and https://www.movie-map.com/

There are other projects to find music and art too. I have only used movies one a number of times.

Re: Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

#196

Post by adithyareddy » Thu, May 08, 2025, 6:06 PM UTC

jFriedensreich wrote: post #146

csomar wrote: post #139

If you are looking for a UI framework, checkout IBM Carbon: https://carbondesignsystem.com I used it to build a merge conflict tool: https://codeinput.com and while it required a much deeper understanding than just reading the docs (tons of bugs), it is by far the most comprehensive UI framework out there. Most UIs either lack lots of components or are made by a couple front-end/react/css guys. This inevitably means…

I thought about carbon too, but unfortunately it gives me extreme IBM cloud ptsd. The number of bad associations products building on that design system have to start with is probably not worth the time savings.

Palantir's Blueprint UI toolkit might scratch the same itch if you're looking to build very functional, dense UIs: https://blueprintjs.com/docs/

Re: Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

#197

Post by porphyra » Thu, May 08, 2025, 6:10 PM UTC

chromy wrote: post #17

Look for tracing/profiling/binary analysis UIs: - https://superuser.com/questions/1117466/using-windows-perfor... - https://github.com/wolfpld/tracy - https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex 3D modeling / CAD software: - Blender/Rhino etc - Similar for audio you can search for 'DAWs' ( https://blog.landr.com/best-daw/ ) Many examples on https://x.com/usgraphics/media only some software. Not on the data side but can be usefu…

I love Rhino's CLI-focused UI. Too bad it is nearly impossible to run it on Linux with Wine [1]

[1] https://github.com/smola/wine-rhino3d

Re: Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

#198

Post by carlosjobim » Thu, May 08, 2025, 6:10 PM UTC

jorvi wrote: post #144

thih9 wrote: post #33

Programs used by pro creatives. Some people regularly spend 8h/day using a single such product as their primary work tool. E.g. pro desktop versions of photo, print, video, sound, etc editing software usually feature good UX and high information density. One well known example of that is Blender - here is a chapter from their manual about its user interface: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/interface/window_…

I am still hoping that one day we get an open source image editing application to the level of Photoshop (and for Darktable to become as good as Aperture / Lightroom). One of the things that Blender did right is adhering to industry standards, especially keybinds. When Blender did their huge UI rework they decided to normalize to the keybinds of its closed-source competitors, along with some of the workflows. Meanwhi…

There are already two top quality offers available in Affinity and Pixelmator, both for extremely cheap prices. No need for any open source project.

Re: Ask HN: What are good high-information density UIs (screenshots, apps, sites)?

#199

Post by wussboy » Thu, May 08, 2025, 6:11 PM UTC

nicce wrote: post #187

WillAdams wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is (was?) an absolutely fabulous answer on quora.com which detailed how this site came to be --- from memory: - initial ecommerce site was a mess (basically a page-by-page recreation of the catalog?) which saw minimal usage - the redesign, which focused on usability --- notably reduced cognitive load --- resulted in an immediate uptick in orders which grew markedly for a long while until it represented the vast…

If you don't care about SEO, Single-page Applications usually reach the same feeling? when the components are well designed, and clicking something just fetches the parameters for the components that are primarily loaded on the initial render. But usually the implementations are poor or there is additional bloat so we don't see them as fast.